Dead Drops take music promo to the 'hidden cloud'

Bondage Fairies geocaching music fragments

Swedish indie band, Bondage Fairies, has used underground cloud phenomenon Dead Drops as a marketing tool for the global launch of their new music.

Fragments of the band's new song have been deposited on USB sticks in a geocaching exercise covering 17 cities, including Stockholm, London, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, New York, Barcelona, Mexico City and Paris and the band’s fans have been invited to find them and upload their discoveries to a website.

Dead Drops is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. It is open to anyone and everyone may install a Dead Drop in their neighborhood/city, according to the site’s manifesto.

German media artist Aram Bartholl started the ‘Dead Drops’ project during his artist in residency in New York City at EYEBEAM in October 2010.

“A Dead Drop is a naked piece of passively powered Universal Serial Bus technology embedded into the city, the only true public space. In an era of growing clouds and fancy new devices without access to local files we need to rethink the freedom and distribution of data. The Dead Drops movement is on its way for change!,” Bartholl states.

In the case of the Bondage Fairies the band has used the Dead Drops movement as an artful means of promo and global branding. When all the band’s sticks are found and the codes on them are sent to the website, the song will be released, free to download, to all.

The Dead Drops website keeps a catalogue of all Dead Drop projects submitted worldwide and posts details of USB retrieval s on a global map.

The details of the hunt were released last week and the first five were found within the first 24 hours.

The band’s manager Felix Heinrich told Swedish news site The Local, that the band felt Dead Dropping fitted with the Bondage Fairies’ music, which is electronic-based. “If they were a folk band playing acoustic guitars, the hunt wouldn’t make much sense,” he said.

The band dropped USBs in countries like the Ukraine and Russia, where it is experiencing a spike in following. “We’re pioneering the idea over there to see what they make of it,” Heinrich said. ®